The Mill, by E.A. Robinson, presented here to show what family dairy farmers, small business owners, people whose life savings have been in invested in a bar or restaurant or other such enterprise, are facing due to this shutdown, which is being imposed on them despite their living in areas where basic social distancing measures need not interrupt daily life that much, and where the medical capacity to treat potentially severe cases of the virus is adequate to the task. In the poem, time and technology have rendered the couple's livelihood and way of life obsolete. Today, by order of the governor, such couples are expected to inflict this obsolescence on themselves deliberately. And people wonder that there is push back and protest?
The Mill
The miller's wife had waited long,
The tea was cold, the fire was dead;
And there might yet be nothing wrong
In how he went and what he said:
"There are no millers any more,"
Was all that she had heard him say;
And he had lingered at the door
So long that it seemed yesterday.
Sick with a fear that had no form
She knew that she was there at last;
And in the mill there was a warm
And mealy fragrance of the past.
What else there was would only seem
To say again what he had meant;
And what was hanging from a beam
Would not have heeded where she went.
And if she thought it followed her,
She may have reasoned in the dark
That one way of the few there were
Would hide her and would leave no mark:
Black water, smooth above the weir
Like starry velvet in the night,
Though ruffled once, would soon appear
The same as ever to the sight.